1.1 Inquiring into the Subject/The Inquiring Subject

The political interpretation of the Romantic Self proposed in this book is based on her deposition from the throne that pictured her as queen of nature. This is not a loss, though: on the contrary, throughout these pages we will see that this allows us to think of the human/nature relationship more as harmony than as a struggle. For the Romantics, the human being is part of nature, and not opposed to it, and her categories or will cannot be imposed on the natural realm. Their relationship is an interaction.

The Romantic gnoseology gains political relevance, then. The Romantics’ critique of the subject–object dualism or of the divergence between ideal and real goes hand in hand with their concept of a fragile and dependent subjectivity. Indeed, in this chapter I will show that consistent with the importance given to the faculty of feeling and to love, the Romantics imagine their ontology as based on relationships (more than identity) and, as a consequence, the self is entangled in a mesh of reciprocal dependencies, excluding – as will be shown in the next chapter – the possibility of labelling her as ‘sovereign’.

This political perspective on the Romantic philosophy of knowledge starts with the idea of ‘experiment’, which for the Romantics is a genetic method through which the subject–object dualism is undermined. It might be surprising for everyone looking at German Romanticism as a possible source for an environmental approach to nature to see how much the Romantics praised the idea of philosophy as an experiment. In environmental philosophy, indeed, the modern experimental method is frequently characterised as a form of domination of nature by scientists.Footnote ¹ In experiments, Francis Bacon writes, nature is ‘restrained and vexed’ as it is ‘forced out of its own condition by human action, and squeezed and moulded’ (Reference Bacon, Bacon, Spedding, Ellis and Heath1863: 34). In this way, experiments promise to help humanity regain ‘the sovereignty and power (for whensoever he [man] shall be able to call the creatures by their true names he shall again command them) which he had in his first state of creation’ (34).Footnote ²

This interpretation of the experimental method as a form of domination was also widespread in late eighteenth-century philosophy.Footnote ³ Kant exalted the experimental method as the instrument of a veritable revolution whereby the understanding of nature would move confidently along the path of science. In the introduction to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Bacon, Torricelli, and Galileo are praised precisely for the methodological innovation made possible by the experimental method, based on the idea that ‘reason has insight only into what it itself produces according to its own design’ (Bxiii / CpR 109). This rational design (the planning of the experiment) is what makes it possible to discover the laws of nature. Through the experimental method, Kant writes, scientists come to understand nature, insofar as it accords with their own reason.

Kant’s Copernican Revolution relied on the same worldview. In the words of the first Critique, ‘objects must conform to our knowledge’ (Bxvi / CpR 110). Applied to metaphysics, this also yielded Kant’s definition of the limits of knowledge and objectivity. Reason can know only what it produces according to its own schema, and the subject–object relationship implied by Kant’s understanding of the experimental method precludes reason being affected by the constant transformations of nature. Subjectivity is not touched by those mutations. Kant entrusts the philosopher with a viewpoint external to what is being investigated and, taking mechanism as its model, his idea of science reduces objects to transparent geometric figures devoid of qualities, evolutions, and stochastic factors. The first Critique accentuates the idea that experiments must be designed based on necessary and rational laws; and this means, in the words of Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine and philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers, that it ‘silences’ nature (Reference Prigogine and Stengers1979: 101). No dialogue between humans and nature seems possible within this view. Kant’s Copernican Revolution places the subject at the centre of knowledge, and as she applies her categories to nature, it is muted.

In fact, this perspective silences not only nature but also the human being. If the subject is at the centre of knowledge – the sun around which the planets revolve – then the human being in her materiality and individuality remains opaque precisely because she is transformed into a transcendental subject, the guardian of immutable laws. She becomes a mathematical, immaterial point of observation.Footnote ⁴ The essence of the subject is external to the becoming of nature, just as the subject is not conditioned by history, social transformations, or her own physical condition. She is a sovereign outside Becoming, reduced to a static entity, deprived of any unpredictable and mutable character, and from this position she subjugates nature.

It is thus surprising that the German Romantic philosophers, who did not celebrate the human domination of nature, nonetheless paid particular attention to the potential of the experimental method. Friedrich Schlegel, in his Jena Lectures of 1800–1801, even claimed that ‘philosophy is an experiment’ (KFSA XII: 3). But this view, influenced by Schelling, does not correspond to the experimental method hailed by Kant. In his early works on natural philosophy (First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature and Introduction to His Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, both 1799), Schelling writes that the experiment is the only coherent means of knowing nature as active and changing. As he conceives of them, experiments provide the necessary conditions for a clear presentation of the observed objects’ transformations. They are not impositions on or disruptions of nature by the subject. Rather, an experiment is an act – characterised by Jelscha Schmid (Reference Schmid2018) and Daniel Whistler (Reference Whistler2013: 119) as ‘performative’ – in which nature presents its own activity.Footnote ⁵ It does not serve to obtain a result that can later be analysed and possibly reduced to mathematics, or to explain what nature is, but rather to show how it has become what it is.

Both Schelling and Schlegel see in the experiment the instrument of a ‘genetic’ method suitable for understanding the inexhaustible creativity of nature and analogous to their own approach to philosophy (KFSA XII: 49).Footnote ⁶ Contrary to mechanistic philosophy, the Romantics saw experiments as shedding light on Becoming, and defined their own philosophy as dynamic (KFSA XVIII: 331, n. 173).Footnote ⁷ Thus, Schlegel writes in Athenaeum (1798) – the journal he founded with his brother August Wilhelm – that mechanism is characteristic of elementary thinking, and is incapable of illuminating the forces underlying nature (KFSA II: 232, n. 366 / Fragments 221; KFSA II: 243, n. 412 / Fragments 229).Footnote ⁸

The genetic method had previously been applied to mathematical entities (by Kant but also by Euclid), whereby the experiment consists in the construction of a geometric figure.Footnote ⁹ When applied in philosophy – so Schlegel argues – this method unveils the genesis of the analysed object.Footnote ¹⁰ And if in geometry form and matter coincide, so that geometric constructions can be made a priori, independently of experience, then the objects of philosophy (nature, history, etc.) can be known only a posteriori. As envisioned by the Romantics, the philosophical experiment consists in focusing on a specific phenomenon whose origin and activity are revealed to us. Recall Schlegel’s declaration: ‘Philosophy is an experiment, and therefore everyone who wishes to philosophize must begin again and again from the beginning’ (KFSA XII: 3). In the process, the infinite creativity of the Absolute and of nature are also revealed (KFSA XVIII: 155, n. 380). The Romantic experiment is then not a dissection of nature: it neither silences nature nor seeks to achieve human sovereignty and power over it. Rather, it is a collaboration between subject and object that makes it possible to perceive the emergence of a process.Footnote ¹¹ Generalising what Daniel Whistler (Reference Whistler2013) writes about Schelling, the construction that takes place in the course of the Romantic experiment is not a framework that the philosopher imposes on reality but rather a process that reality itself undertakes (123). And that is not all. As Schlegel wrote in 1798, ‘the essence of the logical experiment consists in the comparison of objects with the world; it is still not enough to make them appear’ (KFSA XVIII: 218, n. 288).Footnote ¹² Indeed, the Romantic experiment goes beyond the observed process, relating it to everything from which it was initially isolated, gradually leading to a broader view, and ultimately revealing the connections between all natural processes.Footnote ¹³ The experiment is then the creation (Hervorbringen) of the whole, not just of a single object or concept (KFSA XII: 18).

But true understanding of the phenomenon requires looking at different aspects and repeating experiments under different conditions, with different subjects and objects. The experiment consists in their constantly renewed interaction.Footnote ¹⁴ To know a phenomenon, it is not sufficient to describe the laws it follows, its reasons and causes: it must be presented (dargestellt) because it is only ‘through presentation [Darstellung] that what happens in us will have to happen in others’ (KFSA XII: 102). Only through the recreation of the subject–object dialogue is comprehension of the phenomenon possible.

Beside Schelling, there is another progenitor of the Romantic idea of experiments: Fichte. In 1798, Schlegel wrote that ‘[Fichte’s] Doctrine of Science is an experiment’ (KFSA XVIII: 135, n. 160).Footnote ¹⁵ Despite the growing distance between the Romantics and Fichte,Footnote ¹⁶ his idea that philosophy should present the development of consciousness, and that the listener or reader must reproduce in their own consciousness what Fichte describes in his lectures or publications, is a legacy appropriated by Romanticism but underestimated in the scholarly literature today.Footnote ¹⁷ Fichte’s many rewritings of the Doctrine of Science – like the constant reproduction of an experimentFootnote ¹⁸ – resonate in Romanticism, as does the importance Fichte placed on a genetic ‘construction’ of philosophy (GA I/3: 254).Footnote ¹⁹ Nonetheless, the differences are undeniable. Fichte’s idealism experiments with consciousness and subjectivity; Romanticism applies the experimental method also to nature (i.e. the object). So just as in the Doctrine of Science, the first step necessary towards revealing the emergence of our consciousness is the reproduction of an original identity of subject and object (i.e. the intellectual intuition),Footnote ²⁰ and just as for Schelling the experiment has to overcome the representation–object duality,Footnote ²¹ so too must the experiment begin by overcoming the subject–object dualism, according to the Romantics.Footnote ²² This is possible only through feeling, the topic to which we now turn.

1.2 Knowing and Feeling: Beyond Dualisms

Thinking of philosophy as an experiment implied, for the Romantics, accepting that the human being does not dominate nature but is instead constantly and inevitably influenced by it. The Romantic refusal of the modern idea of experimentation is not an expression of irrationalism – or a critique of technology.Footnote ²³ Rather, it promotes a comprehension in which the object is not crystallised before the subject’s gaze. Subject and object are fruits of the same transformations, so that the subject is not isolated in an abstract dimension but connected to the object of study – influenced by it and affected by the conditions in which both she and the object find themselves.

This idea that subject and object interact subverts the rationalist epistemological framework. The deep relationship between the knower and the known is manifested first and foremost in feeling (Gefühl). Novalis writes in his General Brouillon that to carry out experiments, we must have a feeling for nature (HKA III: 256, n. 89 / AB 14). Only through this can we overcome the dualism of the critical philosophy.

The possibility that knowledge might be the result not (only) of the subsumption of matter by the forms of intuition and the intellect preoccupied all the Romantics. Although feeling is central to Romanticism’s approach to epistemology, it has often been forgotten by scholars in recent years, who have given preference instead to other cognitive faculties: the productive imaginationFootnote ²⁴ and, above all, (intellectual or aesthetic) intuition.Footnote ²⁵ Although their importance cannot be disputed, they have obscured the role of feeling, a cornerstone of Romantic philosophy.Footnote ²⁶ Indeed, feeling manifests the primordial connection between subject and object and is the foundation of the relational idea of the subject. This connection overcomes the chasm between thought and its object, a chasm so deep in Kant’s transcendental philosophy that it makes the coexistence of freedom and nature impossible and prevents the attribution of any content to the moral law – problems the Romantics confronted again and again in their works.

On this, Schleiermacher’s perspective was central. From his earliest studies – even before he met Friedrich Schlegel and the other members of the Jena Romantics – Schleiermacher looked to Spinoza and Leibniz for answers to problems he found unresolved in Kant’s philosophy. Studying Leibniz’s theory of knowledge in 1797–1798, he found that ‘Leibniz wants to overcome the opposition between the “I” and the “Not-I”, for this, agere and pati are different only in degree’ (KGA I/2: 85, n. 36). Thanks to Spinoza (whom he most probably read through the lens of Jacobi’s interpretation; see Lamm, Reference Lamm1994a), Schleiermacher discovered the possibility of a knowledge that does not oppose a priori forms to matter.Footnote ²⁷ This knowledge, which has similarities with Spinoza’s scientia intuitiva and amor dei intellectualis, consists for Schleiermacher in feeling. In his notes from 1793 to 1794, published under the title Spinozism (Spinozismus), Gefühl is a feeling of Being that cannot be fully understood through concepts (KGA I/1: 334–335). It does not consist in the perception of an opposition between ideal and real (subject and object) but rather in the immersion of the self in a dimension that both penetrates and surpasses it, and in which the gap between idealism and realism is closed. The common ground of subject and object excludes all those conceptual opposites, and knowledge is not the imposition of categories proper to the knowing I on objects.

A few years later, in August 1797, Schleiermacher met Friedrich Schlegel, with whom he also shared a flat in Berlin for a few months, and thus became involved in the philosophical exchange of the Romantic circle. The importance of feeling returns in On Religion (1799), where Schleiermacher’s earlier studies of Spinoza and Leibniz (as well as Schelling’s early work on natural philosophy) are also clearly echoed.Footnote ²⁸ Here he explores an epistemology that reassesses the subject–object relationship Kant and Fichte saw as an opposition. Although these two names are never explicitly mentioned, it is hard to ignore the proximity of Fichte’s and Kant’s philosophy to the metaphysics and morals that Schleiermacher vehemently dismisses as limited understandings of human beings and nature.Footnote ²⁹

In On Religion, it becomes clear that, for Schleiermacher, Kant’s Copernican Revolution and the Doctrine of Science place the human being at the centre of the entire universe (KGA I/2: 211 / On Religion 23), and that, for this reason, their metaphysics examine nature only in terms of what it can be for us (212 / 23). Kant’s transcendental deduction of categories put metaphysics on the right path for becoming a science, but this reduced all speculation to a ‘stiff and barren skeleton’ (212 / 23). The human/universe opposition, according to Schleiermacher, prevents us from understanding the universe (212 / 23). A first step towards a better understanding of the natural world was taken by the science of the time, well articulated and integrated into Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature: nature, he writes, is ‘an eternally prolonged play of opposing forces [ewig fortgeseztes Spiel entgegengesezter Kräfte]’ (191 / 5).Footnote ³⁰

This new comprehension of nature also concerns our idea of humankind (192 / 5). For Schleiermacher, every ‘human soul’ is indeed the result of two opposing impulses, parallel to the expansive and attractive forces found in nature: on the one hand, the tendency to absorb everything around us into ourselves, and on the other, the aspiration to expand, to penetrate everything (191 / 5). But we can never grasp the universe if we persist in our attempt to master (bezwingen) nature to the self (224 / 34). The metaphysics centred on the I is limited, and this weakness is by Schleiermacher’s lights reflected in the moral philosophy deduced from it. From the practical perspective too, the subject and its categories are at the centre. The realm of freedom, understood as strictly human freedom, wants to extend infinitely, subjugating everything – ‘morality proceeds from the consciousness of freedom; it wishes to extend freedom’s realm to infinity and to make everything subservient to it’ (212 / 23). Thus everything that cannot aspire to the autonomy of the forms of the intellect and reason is condemned as ‘impure and self-seeking’ (237 / 46). This goes not only for nature but also for any human element that does not derive exclusively from the pure forms of these faculties, leading to an ‘awe [Ehrfurcht]’ of the moral law that derives from such forms (237 / 46). And so compassion, gratitude, love, and affection are not considered moral because they depend on things external to the pure self.Footnote ³¹

The specific knowledge that makes it possible to overcome the separation between human beings and nature, between the ideal and the real, is, according to Schleiermacher, religion, which he conceived in such a distinctly Spinozist way as to be accused of atheism.Footnote ³² And indeed, Schleiermacher’s religion is not the worship of a transcendent entity but envisions nature as a dynamic infinity in which forces give life to the whole and to its members, including the human being. Religion understands the human being within this play of natural forces (212 / 23–24)Footnote ³³ without, however, reducing her to a possible object of study for the natural sciences, which might describe her empirical anatomy, physiology, or psychology. Certainly she is part of nature, but nature is something infinite and living, in communion with which she can become ‘one with the infinite in the midst of the finite and … be eternal in a moment’ (247 / 54). The way to this eternity in finitude is indicated by religion, which sees the Infinite and the Universe within human beings (211–212 / 23). If the metaphysics criticised by Schleiermacher put the subject on a pedestal from which she gazes down at nature, the religion he envisages teaches human beings their limitations, insofar as they are but a small part of the immeasurable (Unermeßlichen, 212 / 23), and the infinite, uninterrupted activity of the universe (214 / 25). Schleiermacher’s critique of metaphysics, laid out in On Religion, does not call for the elimination of metaphysics tout court but for its reformulation.Footnote ³⁴

It is not simply a matter of deciding whether Romanticism is a kind of idealism or realism.Footnote ³⁵ What Romanticism proposes is a different relationship between the subject and the object. The Romantics reject the Kantian idea of knowledge as the result of the intersection between intellectual forms and contents coming from outside the ‘I think’Footnote ³⁶ – a logic that finally excludes human beings from nature.

Locating humankind within nature, as we read in Schleiermacher’s On Religion, implies that knowledge is not simply the static (almost mechanical and extemporaneous) combination of a form and an object. Even when Kant contemplates the possibility of knowing living beings through teleological judgement, the vitality of the object remains confined within a construction in which the parts of the organism are functional in relation to each other, but no particular relationship obtains between the observing subject and the object being contemplated: they remain external to each other. Kant’s transcendental philosophy is not sufficient: not because Schleiermacher aims to know the thing in itself, or in his words, ‘the nature of things’ (die Natur der Dinge, 214 / 25), but because neither Kant nor Fichte consider the possibility of the object being active in the cognitive process – not just a collision (Fichte) or an impression on the senses (Kant) but a real, constant, radical influence. If we are part of an infinite, living universe, that universe acts (handelt) on us before any intuition takes place (245 / 53). And all intuition arises from an influence that the object has on the subject, a conditioning that cannot be summed up in the simple transfer of content to a form (213 / 24–25). The object plays an active part in the cognitive journey,Footnote ³⁷ and the subject is involved in the transformations of the universe (to use Schleiermacher’s terminology), so that knowledge cannot be thought of as a relationship between two separate and indeed opposed entities.

In Schleiermacher’s thought, the opposition between the subject and its object is overcome via the idea that knowledge begins at a moment in which form and content, subject and object, are not separate. It is a ‘first and mysterious moment’ in perception, in which the senses and the perceived object are not separate but interpenetrated as one (Eins, 221 / 31). And this first and mysterious relation is feeling (Gefühl), in which the subject–object distinction is forgotten (218 / 29).

Feeling also figures in Fichte’s Doctrine of Science, but in a very different way. In the Foundation (1794), feeling is in fact the faculty by which the I discerns itself as limited, through representations accompanied by the feeling of necessity (GA I/4: 186–187; GA I/2: 28), and which the finite I attributes to a Not-I outside itself. For Schleiermacher, on the other hand, feeling is a conjunction in which there is no duplicity but also no reduction to the recognition of a single limited activity (as in Fichte): in Schleiermacher’s feeling, ideal and real are inseparable but not reduced to the transcendental subject’s activity. ‘Why do you see everything individually, which surely does not function individually and for itself?’ he asks rhetorically (KGA I/2: 231 / On Religion 40). There is no isolation, no separation, no juxtaposition: on the contrary, all things penetrate each other and create bonds of dual dependence. Just as the I is present in nature and in the infinite, and is therefore determined by them, so too does the I determine them, in virtue of being part of them.

Feeling is the faculty that enables the subject to perceive the forces of the world and of infinite life, but in such a way that she perceives them, Schleiermacher writes, as ‘her own’ (221). Not in the sense that they are the powers of an absolute I, which the finite I attributes to Not-I. Feeling recognises us as part of such forces, which therefore penetrate us and are part of us (in this sense they are ‘ours’), but at the same time they are beyond us. Subjects and objects are on the very same level: connected and mutually implied in a reciprocal and indissoluble influence.

In developing this notion of feeling, the Romantics aim to bring together idealism and realism, thought and reality. This involves a conception of subjectivity conditioned by the other: in Andreas Arndt’s words, Schleiermacher’s subjectivity is an ‘indebted subjectivity [verdankte Subjektivität]’ (Reference Arndt2021: 67–68). No longer is the subject posited as the guardian of a priori forms of knowledge and morality, or as the foundation of philosophy. The self, even when conceived as a relation to itself (as self-consciousness), is a relation to that which lies outside the self: to the Absolute and to Being (identical and unknowable but perceptible through feeling),Footnote ³⁸ but also to that which lies outside consciousness and which Schleiermacher, in a letter to Carl Gustav von Brinckmann dated 4 January 1800, calls the ‘real world [wirkliche Welt]’ (KGA V/3: 316). The self is never merely ideal, never pure.

In one of Schleiermacher’s earliest writings (On the Supreme Good, 1789), there is still an invocation of pure reason by which to understand moral concepts (KGA I/1: 84), but the claim that the supreme moral good (beatitude) can be a pure concept of reason is already called out as an erroneous conception that would also make the achievement of that good impossible. He writes:

This disjunction between a creature whose will can be completely determined by pure reason, on the one hand, and the sensible human being situated in a world of material relations and influences, on the other, is for Schleiermacher an impasse in Kant’s practical philosophy that leads to an internal contradiction (95).

Schleiermacher’s writings, particularly On Religion, had an enormous influence on the other Romantic philosophers, who followed similar lines of reflection.Footnote ³⁹ Traces of his ideas are echoed even years later, in Bettina von Arnim’s or in Günderrode’s works.Footnote ⁴⁰

Between 1798 and 1800, Novalis wrote three texts (The Disciples of Saïs, Christendom or Europe, and Heinrich von Ofterdingen) that addressed the relationship between human beings and nature, and resound with certain themes from Schleiermacher’s work – in particular, the importance of feeling. Feeling is a source of knowledge about nature, and at the same time – as in Schleiermacher – it deprives human beings of the crown that would put them at the apex of nature. Novalis had dealt with feeling before discovering Schleiermacher’s philosophy, but in a very different way: namely, in the Fichte Studies, a collection of fragments written between 1795 and 1796, and inspired by Fichte’s works. In this collection, intellectual intuition – the act at the heart of consciousness in which subject and object coincide – is divided into two moments: feeling and reflection (HKA II: 114, n. 16 / FS 13).Footnote ⁴¹ The former (Gefühl) is a content not posited by the I (125, n. 31 / FS 23–24) and is the matter of reflection (116, n. 19 / FS 15), which constitutes the form of consciousness (122, n. 27 / FS 21). Developing his interpretation of Novalis from these fragments, Manfred Frank (Reference Frank2002) proclaimed that Romanticism is essentially a realism insofar as it recognises an element (the matter offered to reflection by feeling) within the self that is not perfectly intelligible; that is, not posited by the self. Later interpreters have stressed how this ‘realism’ is reconsidered in Novalis’ later works, especially in the fragments of the General Brouillon, where the I is immersed in the Absolute, which, although not fully transparent in all its details to the eyes of the subject, can nevertheless be comprehended from a more general perspective.Footnote ⁴² Regardless, the concept of feeling continued to play an important role in his philosophy, not so much as the presence of a ‘given’ within the original act of consciousness but rather to indicate the relationship between subject and object.

Christendom or Europe was completed the same year that Schleiermacher wrote his On Religion (1799). It would be published posthumously upon the insistence of Friedrich Schlegel and against the opinion of Goethe and Ludwig Tieck – the latter worried that this obscure text would be misinterpreted as conservative. Here Novalis protests against what he saw as a widespread hatred of feeling in his time (HKA III: 515 / N 248). To us this claim may seem paradoxical because in our vocabulary hatred itself is in every sense a feeling. Not so in the language of Romanticism. In The Disciples of Saïs, feeling is characterised as a ‘heavenly’ sense that enables the perception of ‘the inner music of nature’ (HKA I: 95 / N 353); and in Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Novalis writes that feeling is what lets us grasp the ‘mysterious spirit of life’ (HKA I: 259 / N 419).Footnote ⁴³ The Romantic ‘feeling’ is then not a category of affects that can include hatred. It is a thoroughly positive faculty through which we can break with the vision of nature as a machine, a ‘mill … without architect or miller’, a ‘self-grinding mill’ (HKA III: 515 / N 248). This image is proper to mechanistic science, in whose idea of nature there is no life and no place for the forces that make it a dynamic whole, and which therefore cannot see the infinite connections and relationships that bind all beings together. It is only through feeling that we can perceive the harmony of nature (HKA I: 95 / N 353), discerning the dense mesh of interdependencies in nature and recognising that nothing can exist ‘without others’ (95 / N 353).

The human being is necessarily a part of this web of mutual dependencies, and this informs Novalis’ concept of subjectivity.Footnote ⁴⁴ If nothing exists without the other, then neither does the subject – and not simply because, in order for there to be an I, it must be opposed to a Not-I, but because everything, in its own peculiarity, constantly affects the subject. We are no longer at the apex of a supposed natural hierarchy of beings (HKA III: 515 / N 248). But to assert this is not, for Novalis, to call into question the possibility of knowing nature. We can envision a science capable of grasping the interdependent relations between beings; and in the natural sciences of his time, with its studies of magnetism and electricity, and the advances of physiology, Novalis indeed saw indications of a possible new comprehensive understanding (519 / N 251). What needed changing, however, was the way in which knowledge was conceived: not as a struggle between the knowing subject and the known object but rather as a reciprocity in which the object modifies the subject as much as it is modified by it. Not an opposition between a priori form and a posteriori matter, but a mutual interpenetration.

If feeling is a relation to the object (HKA II: 130, n. 41 / FS 29), what kind of relation is it? In the collection of fragments entitled Pollen, published in 1798 in the Athenaeum, Novalis ventures: ‘What I seem to learn is only nourishment’ (419, n. 19 / N 70). While this metaphor may seem to suggest simply that new knowledge makes us grow spiritually, he would elaborate on the analogy in subsequent texts. Schlegel, too, picked it up, writing with reference to Novalis a few months later that ‘In order to perceive an object, I must eat it’ (KFSA XVIII: 146, n. 276). Novalis remarked in turn that ‘In general, the sense eats, digests, secretes or fertilises’ (HKA III: 88). And when the eye sees light, it is not simply stimulated by it; rather, ‘an eye that sees … devours light’ (96). Soon he would generalise this idea: ‘Sensing is devouring’ (288, n. 273 / AB 40). The object is not a product of the self or an element external to the subject: the object enters the subject and, like what we eat, becomes part of us, transforming us. This analogy between digestive activity and knowledge has the same aim as the passages from Schleiermacher’s On Religion: to subvert our conception of the subject–object relationship.

But this image of knowledge risks reintroducing a dualism (between eater and eaten, interiority and exteriority) parallel to the thinking/being distinction that Novalis seeks to overcome. This problem is addressed in a famous fragment of General Brouillon, where Novalis traces the correspondence between inner and outer:

In Pollen, he adds to this picture:

The ever-possible inversion of the inner and the outer dimensions does not warrant the view that for Romanticism knowledge is nothing more than the subjective projection of the self onto nature: on the contrary, it is precisely because the inversion works in both directions that we can claim that thoughts grasp reality. This is possible because – as we read in the continuation of fragment 820 – before the subject–object separation there is a universal principle that constitutes every being (including the I) through its own dynamic processes of development, and it continues to pervade every self and every object, connecting them. Thus, every object is ‘instead of Not-I[, a] You’ (HKA III: 430, n. 820 / AB 151, translation modified). That principle is not, as in Fichte’s philosophy, an absolute I that determines itself and thereby produces its own limits, leading to the finite I (the knowing subject) that projects its own limits on the equally finite Not-I (the known object). For Novalis, knowledge is not the correspondence between two opposed entities (subject and object, internal and external) but the result of a relationship between an I and a You – or, rather, several You’s. This relationship is perceived by feeling: our understanding of nature and of our place within it originates in the Gefühl, which, in turn, is a development of the relationship between two subjects (I and You) living within each other. Therefore, when Novalis describes knowledge as devouring, what is devoured is not an object that accesses the I as if it were entering a ‘pure’ space and time of consciousness where the movement of nature is excluded (expelled and limited to what is ‘external’). The I is in part self-reflection, but at the same time it is part of the Absolute that develops and expands outside this introspection. As Beiser (Reference Beiser2002) notes, this organic interaction is never concluded (433).Footnote ⁴⁵

The intense ‘symphilosophical’ dialogue between Novalis, Schleiermacher, and Friedrich Schlegel during those years is further evidenced by the fact that Schlegel too identifies Gefühl as a possible solution to the alterity between idealism and realism.Footnote ⁴⁶ For him too, feeling is the key to understanding our place within nature and an infinite Absolute. In his 1800–1801 lectures in Jena, Schlegel argues that, along with striving (Bestreben), feeling is what constitutes the human being, a faculty therefore more central than intellect and will (KFSA XII: 7). Feeling is an experience of the sublime, analogous to our consciousness of the infinite (7), insofar as it is the perception of the dynamism of that Absolute of which we are part. In some lectures given a few years later in Aubergenville, near Paris, and published under the title Métaphysique, Schlegel translates the German Gefühl with the French sentiment.Footnote ⁴⁷ Aside from the translation, nothing changes: its connection with the infinite is reiterated (KFSA XIII: 396). In these lectures, feeling is always related to the infinite. It is contrasted with intuition (Anschauung), which cannot relate to the infinite and the Absolute (396). That is because intuition – divided between form and content, a priori and a posteriori – is incapable of grasping Becoming and the living infinite (397), which also eludes abstraction (403). In his lectures at Cologne in 1804–1805, Schlegel criticised intuition as the faculty that reduces nature to a thing (Ding), separating all the relations that actually constitute it, abstracting it from that Becoming which precedes (and enables the emergence of) identity. Contrary to intuition, and as Novalis and Schleiermacher had already concluded, feeling relates I and You – two subjects, not a subject and an object. Feeling is a relation, an immediate perception of another I (KFSA XII: 355, 390).

This common dialogue on the role and concept of feeling spread in the Romantic philosophy also beyond the temporal (and geographical) limits of the Jena circle. Some years later, indeed, Bettina von Arnim engages with the idea of feeling as the faculty at the basis of knowledge (ABW II: 474) because it sanctions the reciprocity in the cognitive relationship between subject and object: with a beautiful image, she writes that when I perceive and know some flowers, these know me (AWB I: 251). This reciprocity is a sign of an interdependence that characterises the individuality. The self corresponds for Bettina to the act of feeling herself in the other (sich fühlen im Anderen, AWB I: 381). For the Romantic philosopher, knowledge of nature does not simply imply the discovery of its laws or to write definitions, but first and foremost the capacity to feel the process of Becoming in the natural realm (AWB I: 527) that permeates every singular thing (AWB II: 173).

1.3 Love: Epistemology and Ontology

The relational ontology underlying the Romantic conception of feeling is even more evident in their analysis of love. The very essence of feeling, for Schlegel, is love (Liebe), understood as the bond that connects all beings and makes them exist, linking gnoseology and ontology (KFSA XII: 66). Indeed, life itself, as a force that relates and creates, is love (KFSA II: 264, n. 91 / Fragments 249).Footnote ⁴⁸ Thus it is the source of all feelings, where this bond is present too (KFSA XII: 66).

The philosophy that, according to Schlegel, has placed love at its centre is that of Spinoza (30). His monism allows us to think of human beings and nature within the same whole, in an interweaving of dependencies and connections that prevents us from thinking of one without the other:Footnote ⁴⁹ love is the organic bond between beings (KFSA XII: 70) whereby the existence of each is involved in the life of all the others (KFSA XVIII: 217, n. 278). For this reason, love is not only a force that allows the self to be located within the Absolute; it is also what enables the philosopher to understand the relationship between the knower and the known. Similarly to Novalis, Schlegel writes that love is a point of indifference in which subject and object (or rather, two subjects) are united: ‘A loving becoming one with the object of the I, the You. The marriage of the perceiving I with the perceived spirit is called love’ (KFSA XII: 53, 350).

If feeling plays a crucial role in overcoming Kantian dualism and rethinking the position of the subject in relation to the object, love refers to the relational dimension of reality; it is what connects every being to all others. In this perspective, the subject is placed in a web of relationships that condition it and whose order does not derive from subjectivity. The importance of the concept of love in the writings of Schlegel (and Novalis, as we shall see) is due not only to Spinoza’s influence (as a counterpart of Fichte) but also to that of Hemsterhuis and Herder.Footnote ⁵⁰ Indeed, it is from Herder’s interpretation of Hemsterhuis that the Romantic epistemological and ontological dimension of love is derived. The Romantic concept of love is strongly conditioned by one of his short texts, Letter on Desires (Lettre sur les désirs), written in 1768, published in 1770, and translated into German by Herder in 1781.Footnote ⁵¹

In Hemsterhuis’ original French text, desire is described as the soul’s attempt to unite its essence with that of the object it desires (Reference Hemsterhuis, van Sluis and Whistler2022a: 85), and is therefore analogous to a physical attraction of matter (79, 85), leading to the conclusion that ‘everything naturally tends towards unity’ (85). This tendency is counterbalanced by inertia and by the divine power that prevents the dissolution of individuals into a homogeneous unity (81, 85). The relationship between natural forces and desire outlined by Hemsterhuis is modified by Herder in his German translation, to which he adds a commentary entitled Love and Selfhood, published the same year (FHA IV: 405–424).Footnote ⁵² The translation renders désirs in the singular (das Verlangen),Footnote ⁵³ suggesting the suppression of a potential multiplicity; and the commentary translates désir as Liebe.Footnote ⁵⁴ Moreover, the analogy between the force of attraction and desire that Hemsterhuis alludes to becomes an identity in the German: ‘attraction’ and ‘love’ are two different names for the same force, which is opposed not to inertia but to repulsion.Footnote ⁵⁵ Nature and humans are thus both subject to the same force that pervades the universe. Love, however, has a dark side: it ‘destroys itself or its object with penetrating, devouring flames’ (FHA IV: 413). Indeed, love is fulfilled in pleasure, which leads the lover to absorb the beloved object into herself, thus destroying it (408–409). Although love is seen as a force that pervades all beings, its destructive power is particularly manifest in humans, who, according to Herder, also have an evil tendency – ‘the human being is [the] tyrant [Tyrann] of the universe’ (420) – believing themselves limitless and capable of extending themselves infinitely through the attraction they exert on other things (421). But in reality, they ‘live only thanks to alms’ (421) and must therefore adapt themselves to the ‘economy of desire [and] love’ established by nature, ‘which has divided and at the same time balanced everything in this pulsation of beings who suffer and act, give and receive’ (420–421).

Herder’s translation and annotations, which at once reproduce and betray Hemsterhuis’ thought by transforming his text into an essay on the nature of love, are crucial for explaining the origin of the concept of love in German Romanticism.Footnote ⁵⁶ The movement conceived of love as a force that permeates both humans and nature, putting them on the same level.

Another figure who contributed to the richness of that concept in those years is Franz von Baader. A Bavarian philosopher, scientist, and politician, he was at the centre of one of the sources of all German Romanticism, namely a group of philosophers associated with the Munich Real Academy of Sciences, to which Johann W. Ritter also belonged. Their influence on what is known as ‘Early Romanticism’ was so profound that Philipp Funk (Reference Funk1925) proposes to call them ‘Munich Romanticism’,Footnote ⁵⁷ as an earlier and hitherto underestimated phase of the movement.Footnote ⁵⁸

Franz von Baader was fundamental for both Novalis and Schlegel, as they themselves state in several passages in their works.Footnote ⁵⁹ Referred to by some interpreters as an ‘erotic philosophy’, Baader’s thought was particularly significant to the Romantic view of love.Footnote ⁶⁰ In On Heat Substance, Its Dispersal, Bonding and Discharge (1786), Baader describes a material, the Wärmestoff of the title, from which all matter solidifies (BSW III: 30, 35, 42). In this short but rich text, Baader also identifies an immaterial principle in nature, namely love. This is defined as the ‘universal bond that unites and intertwines the beings of the universe’, comparable to the attractive force that drives the parts of matter together (BSW III: 42). The concept of love plays a role not only in Baader’s philosophy of nature but also in his gnoseology – as it does, together with feeling, for Schlegel, Novalis, and Schleiermacher. In his later Fragments on a Theory of Knowledge (written in 1809), he expounds further on what he had stated in Heat Substance. Here, Baader criticises mechanical knowledge, in which the knowing subject forms her object by ‘constraint’; that is, by applying her own categories to it (BSW I: 53, n. 17). Baader contrasts this to a kind of knowledge he characterises as ‘dynamic’, in which the knower and the known are interwoven and both active in the process of understanding, as a result of their mutual desire for each other (53, nn. 11, 13, 14). For Baader, therefore, true knowledge – aiming to perceive the attractive force of love that permeates all beings – cannot be an imposition of forms on content, but a loving and reciprocal relationship, a perpetual exchange and mutual conditioning in which subject and object are not distinguished as one imposing itself on the other.

The same thinking can be found in Schlegel. Knowledge comes only from love, Schlegel writes in 1804: ‘The condition for the understanding of the intuited object [das Angeschaute] by the subject [der Anschauender] is not any particular power, it is simply love’ (KFSA XII: 369). Although Schlegel seems here to rehabilitate intuition, it does not change much from what we have just seen: the main condition for knowledge is the original contact between knower and known, denying a subject–object opposition (KFSA XII: 369, 100). This contact is present also in Schlegel’s conception of consciousness: feeling, as we have seen, is a peculiar characteristic of consciousness that also precedes its intellectual faculty and will. This feeling, however, is not equivalent to Fichte’s intellectual intuition or to his fact-act (Tathandlung), whereby the I posits itself as subject and object. True (wharhaft) feeling is not only related to the I-ness (Ichheit) but is also always directed towards the world, embracing the infinite unity and fullness of a Spinozist substance (390). In other words, by placing feeling at the centre of the I, the subject is conceived as always containing within itself a relation to otherness, which relation reproduces the organic connections between all beings in all of nature.Footnote ⁶¹ Love binds every member of nature, including human beings, in communicative relationships, and for this reason the I is structurally open to the You.Footnote ⁶² This You, in turn, does not stand before it as an Other, but is part of the same I. Schlegel’s subject then has at her centre a relation to the Other, and this relation entails the permeability of the subject by the Absolute, which embraces it in an organic unity.

Thus, in Romanticism, love is not merely an affective capacity in the individual but rather defines her as an element in a wider network of relationships, of which the subject is not the apex. We see this also in Novalis, according to whom love is a synthetic force (HKA II: 292, n. 651 / FS 190) that unites all beings and with which both science (HKA III: 253–255, n. 79 / AB 12) and religion are concerned (HKA II: 395, n. 56). This is a ‘rational love’, where something is ‘loved’ insofar as it is put within a wider web of relationships (HKA II: 615, n. 424). Novalis is not concerned with the affective sphere of the individual and the ‘personal love’ related to it (615, n. 424 / N 203).

In a similar tone, Bettina von Arnim (maybe under the influence of Hemsterhuis’ philosophy) later writes that love is the entanglement between all things, the condition where one being is in another one (ABW II: 427).Footnote ⁶³ Therefore, the concept of love permits to fade the boundaries that superficially separate the individuals (430), revealing a higher and divine community (509).

The Early Romantic philosophers thus accept the equation of the concept of love with the forces of nature proposed by Baader, and use the term to refer to the bond that unites all beings. Love is not a force liable to destroy the beloved by assimilating her into the lover (as was the case in Herder’s and Hemsterhuis’ views) but rather the network of relationships in which each singularity is situated and open to the others. The love relationship, moreover, involves exchange and communication between beings in which there is no prevarication: rather than the possible destruction of the object (or all of nature) by the human being because of her tyrannical tendencies (as in Herder), Novalis emphasises the constant reciprocity of such assimilation, which does not destroy the beings involved in the love relationship but transforms them.

In a cognitive relationship sprung out of love, there is no opposition between an I and a Not-I but rather a reciprocity between an I and a You. What the concept of love adds to the picture in which feeling is already so central is that the cognitive relationship (originating in feeling) is also part of a wider network of relationships where a universal force – love – unites beings to and in the Absolute. It is a mesh of relations that is not static but in constant transformation, thanks to the relations themselves, which condition all others: the knowledge between two singularities is itself part of that whole, that love that binds everything together, and of the Absolute. Only with an awareness of this connection to an infinite creation and Becoming is it possible to carry out the Romantic experiment, in which not only the genesis of the element in question is revealed but also its connection to the Absolute, to the rest of nature, and to the self.